teaching

Hecklers are those disruptive students who distract the class and challenge the teacher’s authority in front of the class. They don’t appear often, but it’s good to have a game plan for when they show up so that you don’t get flustered. Here are some suggestions for how to handle a classroom heckler.

Prevention

The first line of defense against a heckler is prevention. There are three very good ways to prevent heckling from ever occurring in the first place. The first thing is to have good policies. Good policies let the students know what to expect from being in class. They cover basic things like class meeting times, payment procedure, cancellations, dress, and classroom behavior. If your intake procedure includes providing students with written policies that they read, agree to, and signed, you are less likely to have any disruptions.

Policy enforcement is the second line of defense in prevention. Creating policies is one thing. Enforcing them fairly is another. You can avoid the problems that come along with not enforcing your own policies altogether by only creating policies that you believe in. If you think you should make everyone pay in advance, but you know that some people have extenuating circumstances that should be taken into consideration, include a provision for that. Otherwise you may find yourself violating your own policy because it’s not in line with your values. If you don’t uphold your own policies, you can’t expect your students to do it.

The third prevention strategy is to model the behavior you expect from your students. You can’t expect students to be on time, respectful of others, or present a professional demeanor if you are late, talk about other teachers and show up at performances in a wrinkled costume with no back up music. Your behavior shows them what is acceptable, not your words.

Handling Heckling

If you are doing these three things, your encounters with hecklers should be few and far between. (I have had two in 14 years). However, this doesn’t mean you will avoid them altogether. It’s still possible that it may occur.

Before you decide how to handle heckling, you have to understand that heckling is a way of saying, “I have a problem and don’t have the appropriate coping skills to handle it.” So searching for the problem is the first step to handling the situation. Once you have an identified problem, you can offer a solution.

Example 1: Debbie is making sexual jokes about a new movement. Her comments are making it difficult for others to concentrate. They may make others feel self-conscious about following along.

Possible meaning: Debbie is uncomfortable with the movement.

Possible solution: Say in front of the class, “If this movement makes anyone uncomfortable, it’s perfectly okay skip it and wait for the next one. You don’t ever have to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. This validates Debbie’s feelings and gives her and others permission to honor her discomfort. If Debbie stops making jokes, you will know that you have addressed her problem adequately.

Example 2: Kira stops following along and says, “Why do we have to do it this way?”

Possible meaning: Kira learns better with a different mode of teaching.

Possible solution: Encourage Kira to stick with it and tell her that it will make sense to her if she gives it a chance. Then alter your teaching style to help her get it. Consider visual, auditory and kinesthetic ways of learning. Consider drawing diagrams, providing notes, more context, more breakdown or other ideas that you haven’t used. This shows her that you are listening and allows you to keep control of your classroom.

Example 3: Dawn rolls her eyes as she is following along with the class. She stops, leans up against the wall, and breathes with an audible, heavy sigh.

Possible meaning: Dawn is bored. Dawn can’t keep up.

Possible solution: Encourage Dawn to rejoin the class. Tell her that it’s obvious that she has some concerns and offer to talk with her after class about what is bothering her. This let’s Dawn know that you have noticed her frustration and that you will address it later when it won’t take time away from the rest of the class. Once you and Dawn are alone, you can let her know that she can come to you with frustrations, questions and suggestions. This gives her permission to address her problems directly so that she doesn’t have to act out to get attention.

Heckling can be a very disturbing event when it happens to you. If you handle it well, no one will remember it, and it won’t be a big deal. If you handle it poorly, it could open the door for others to handle their issues in a negative way. So, regularly practice prevention strategies. If it happens to you anyway, keep in mind that all this is saying is, “I have a problem that I don’t know how to address.” This will keep you from taking it personally so that you can focus on dealing with the underlying problem.

Abraham Maslow was one of the last century’s leading thinkers in the field of psychology. He discovered many original thoughts that have applications in various fields, but one of his ideas that I love to reference in teaching belly dance is his four stage learning cycle.

Maslow says that when learning anything, people go through the following four stages of learning: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence, and finally Unconscious Competence. If you understand where the student is, it can help you get her to the next stage. So let’s look at them.

Unconscious Incompetence

At this stage, you don’t know what you don’t know. This could describe someone who isn’t even taking dance lessons yet, is looking at dance from an observer point of view, a beginner, or someone who has taken dance lessons for many years. It’s not about the amount of exposure to dance someone has, but about having the intellectual knowledge to know what the dancer is doing, if she’s doing it well, why she’s doing it the way she’s doing it, and if something is wrong, knowing how to fix it. In other words, the person in the Unconscious Incompetence stage doesn’t know that there is more to know. She only knows what she likes and how things feel.

I once took a group of students to a show. We had a thirteen year old girl there who had been dancing about 3 months. She was cute as could be. She had no fear and went out there and worked the crowd. Later the host told me she was the best performer of the night. Knowing her skill level and that of the other performers, I knew that was certainly not true. She may have been the most entertaining to the host, but the host was operating at the Unconscious Incompetence level. It’s great for us as performers when our audience is ignorant because they are easier to please, but it’s not good for the student to rely on praise and crowd pleasing to measure her skill. If my student accepted the host’s comments as fact, she may have quit taking lessons, started dancing professionally or started teaching at her low level because she also was at a stage where she didn’t that there was more to know.

Ignorance is not a crime. It’s just what we experience when we are doing something new. Like all people, I went through this stage. When I was a new dancer, I was at a video party watching a highly skilled dancer with boredom. I didn’t like her style, so I dismissed her as being someone I didn’t want to learn from. The more experienced dancers didn’t say anything, but I could tell they thought I was insane. Looking back, I laugh at how ignorant I was. Regardless of whether I liked her style, I couldn’t appreciate the dancer’s skill because I didn’t have it and didn’t know what it would take to get it!

Conscious Incompetence

If we stick with something long enough, we get to the next stage which is Conscious Incompetence. This is where the light bulb comes on and we get a clue that we are not all that. This can be emotionally overwhelming as we think things like, “I will never catch up. There is so much to learn. How will I afford the classes I need? Will I have time to devote to this? I have no business being out there dancing in front of people!”

A lot of people give up at this stage. Their anxiety gets the best of them, but this is just a normal part of learning. This is the point at which real progress can be made because you know enough about what you are doing to know when it’s good and when it’s bad. This is an information gathering stage. You may sort what you want from what you don’t want. There are lots of fits and starts that take you to the next stage.

Like many people, I started teaching before I should have. When I started formulating goals for myself and my students, I started realizing all the things that they and I did not know. That helped me tremendously because it gave me focus to start getting what I didn’t have. So, this stage can be motivating or debilitating. It’s really up to you. Either course is normal, but why not choose the more constructive path?

Conscious Competence

The Conscious Competence stage is the working stage. You know what you need to know. You can do what you have to do, but you have to think about it to do it proficiently. The struggle is gone, but effort is still required. It’s here that you start to see results that can propel you to the next stage.

Conscious Incompetence

Conscious Incompetence is the stage we all strive for. This is where you can do something effortlessly without thinking about it. Of course that move was technically flawless, musical, and emotionally effective! You’ve done it so many times in so many ways that it just arrives without thought.

There is danger in this stage of getting stale. Your praise is well deserved and you know it. You do so well at what you do that there may be no challenge to continue learning. Especially if you take a look at something totally new that puts you back at the Conscious Incompetence stage, but growth requires that you be willing to work like a beginner and struggle.

Knowing the cycles of learning can help you do a realistic appraisal of where your students are. It brings awareness into what you do. If your students are not where they want to be, it can help you get them back on track. Using Maslow’s stages of learning can help match your curriculum to the student’s skill level, keep them moving in the right direction, and give you reproducible results from student to student.